Finally fixed the donate link on the PayPal page. Sorry for the delay!

March 26th, 2017

We had an issue with our cloud provider that hosts our assets, related to an updated SSL certificate. Some people ran into issues where the styles dropped off the page. Everything should be up to date and good to go now. Please let us know if you still see any lingering issues. Swipe down to reload!

December 24th, 2016

Merry Christmas fellow MileSteppers! Working on the road from a winter adventure to Montana, Wyoming and Idaho. We have a new version of expense sharing coming up and more work on the groups beta to show soon.

November 25th, 2016

Starting to catch up on emails, if you wrote in the past few weeks, I should get to it soon. Sorry again for the lag!

[Login/Logout] Tracking down some errors with logins & logouts. Looks like chrome switched up how it is caching 301s. Also some brothers are not liking certain types of redirect. In some cases if you deleted an account, a bad redirect would get cached and you could never login again. Made some changes to tell it to not do that, let’s see how it goes.

November 10th, 2016

Still here, we swear! Haven’t had anything to post about in a bit, real life stepped in and both Steve and I had to divert our time a bit to handle our respective lives. In the meantime, I’ve been planning trips and running payments on them through MileStepper. We’d love to open the payments up more, but money makes it “real”, so we’re still hesitant to let that one loose. We’ve got a new feature list and bug tracker up, and are working on some new integrations. More to come!

August 13th, 2016

[Adventures/Invites] Added user icons to invitation dialog when a user is selected, makes the dialog a little clearer

August 7th, 2016

[Operations] We’re now using JIRA for bug/feature tracking and hopefully we are closer to having a feature board w/ voting. We can’t flat out open our jira to the public due to licensing/$ but we’re looking to integrate with the API and display a subset

[Gear] Fixed bug with images being lost after adding an item from the master gear database (search -> save -> image gone)

[Adventures/Discussion] Fixed a bug introduced on Friday causing the last 2 comments to be temporarily hidden if your adventure had more than 5 comments.

August 3rd, 2016

[Global] Fixed non functioning logout button

[Global] Fixed password reset screen, seems to break from time to time (sorry!)

[Global] Fixed error redirect after creating a new account which made account registration look broken under certain conditions

July 31st, 2016

[Adventures] Bug fix on the Complete Trip button in the slideout menu, it was not functional

July 29th, 2016

Sorry for the lull in updates, been busy busting ass on the new gig, but MileStepper is never forgotten!

[Build] Did some work on the build system to make updates a little smoother

[Gear/Closets] Delete closet button was missing, re-added it

[Gear/Closets] Added : menu to easier manage closets from the list

June 17th, 2016

I just started my new job, so I was consumed with learning as much as possible there. I’m doing DevOps for a SaaS company, and a lot of the skills I’m picking up will transition very nicely to MileStepper.

[Adventures/Cards] Fixed a bug with discussion edits not being saved due to a background error (Thanks for the bug report Greg S!

June 6th, 2016

[Global/Speed] Added a header to our assets on Amazon S3/Cloudfront to improve cache response time, resulting in faster page loads

[Gear/Speed] 10x speedup to packing speed in the gear closet (clicking on items)

[Gear] Fixed a weight/text bug when switching between formats

[Adventures/GPX Previews] Fixed metric not working, or working badly on GPS/GPX/KML/GeoJSON previews

June 1st, 2016

[Adventures/Expenses] Doing some more work on trip payments and expenses. This is still not a public feature, but if you’re interested in helping us test it, just let us know and we’ll enable it on your account.

Moved the site again to a new host. Got a better-than-cloud-pricing on an i7-6700k with 16GB and SSD. We’ll run our docker containers on here for 2x better specs and around the same price of digital ocean, feels faster already.

Working on other optimizations for large trips now.

[Adventures/Speed] Optimized trip loading routine, most apparent on trips with a lot of discussion

[Adventures/Cards] Some minor style patches

[Adventures/Cards] Fixed broken card permissions setting

[Global] Removed some internal memory cache routines that were causing memory leaks, they were ineffective anyway. We’ll instead work to optimize things and use the external redis cache better.

May 30th, 2016

Starting to work through the bug backlog, thank all of you for writing in…

Corrected sorting on GPS/GPX elevation graphs which should fix the squiggles some of you have hit

Added option to remove elevation graphs

May 20th, 2016

Hey everyone, sorry for the radio silence. Had some life goings on that are wrapping up this week. It’s a temporary thing, should all be wrapped up soon. If you’ve written to me or posted on reddit and I haven’t gotten back yet, I will soon!

May 11th, 2016

Been a while since I have been able to publish some updates, life has a way of doing that sometimes.

Also, I’m headed out to the wilderness for 4 days, so stay tight!

[Adventures / Maps] Fixed a problem where GPX files were not able to be processed (“Error reading GPS data”)

[Global] “MileStepper Will be Right Back” error — We’re running into random 503 errors are are still hunting down exactly what is causing this. There’s some communication issue between the webserver and app server. We do see it in the logs though, and are monitoring it with some attempted fixes.

May 4th, 2016

Fixed an issue with the map centering on home location, vs centering to trip bounds

May 2nd, 2016

Back in the saddle, other personal project is wrapping up so I’m back to the good life.

[Dashboard] Fixed an issue where some cut-off preview text would cause the page to stop rendering

[Adventures/Invites] Fixed a bug in the autocompletion routine that was introduced when attempting to squash another error. Left the original annoying debug message for now, and will try again later.

April 28th, 2016

[Menus] There as an issue causing items in the upper right menu to not trigger in some configs

April 27th, 2016

[Global/Major Bugfix/Safari] – Fixed a major bug preventing all iOS and Safari browsers from running code. Safari has some nonstandard handling of externally loaded (i.e. cloud hosted) content. We’ve reverted one of the flags we were using to speed up page loads for now, and will revisit that soon. Thanks to all that reported this.

Taking a few personal days off from MileStepper dev. I have to put in some work on a portfolio site and it’ll be time consuming for up to a week or so. We’re in-between major changes at the moment, so this is a good time to knock it out.

April 22nd, 2016

[Adventures/Map] Souped up the map a little, trying to make it easier to add locations from anywhere. Should be able to click on any map page and add a new location card now.

April 21st, 2016

[Adventures/Cards] Added toolbar back in to text editor (sorry it was afk for a bit)

April 19th, 2016

[Adventures/Tags] Added auto-complete to tags to help you keep things consistent

Doing some more tests running the server out of New York, sorry for any interruptions you may have noticed when we shifted

April 15th, 2016

Finally figured out why we weren’t receiving full JS errors from browsers which prevented us some fixing some issues some of you were hitting. For anyone that is curious, after we offloaded scripts to Amazon there was some security settings that needed to be loosened for external scripts to report errors. Boring. Anyway.

[Preferences/Profile photo] Caught some js errors during profile save that may have prevented a page reload

April 14th, 2016

We’re getting there!

April 13th, 2016

[Global] Some more optimizations to the pipeline of how the page loads, trying to prevent blocking elements and get new pages loaded faster.

April 12th, 2016

[Adventures] Fixed a nasty bug in the Social invitation that leaked some access, thanks for reporting this.

April 10th, 2016

[Global] Updated React to 0.15.1, looks like a pretty vast reduction in HTML page size due to wonderful new improvements from them

[URL Previews] The screenshotter was broken and resulting in some broken images, should be all fixed up

[Adventures] #Tags are back! Let us know if you run into any problems. We’ll add autocomplete shortly once the backend of that is done

[Global] Working on some new methods of tracking down errors triggered in browsers

April 8th, 2016

[Global] Finished up removing the last of our old style html templates, so we could remove the old Hogan library and a bunch of other html loader cruft.

[Adventures] Difficulty is back! We removed the Difficulty setting for simplification back in the day, but it’s pretty necessary after all we decided. It may move around, but it’s here to stay.

[Adventures] Working on getting tags added back in, put a placeholder in for now and it should be finished by the end of the weekend

April 7th, 2016

[Global] Fixed a bug in the mobile menu that was causing it to not expand when pressing the hamburger

[Adventures] Massive speedup on the backend when loading trips, still some more of this to come

[Adventures/Cards] Some people had problems saving cards due to a missing library, should be fixed up

[Dashboard] Added photos to shop/blog items with a feature set

April 6th, 2016

[Global] Consolidated all CSS down to a single file, versioned, hosted on Cloudfront. This completes our cloud offloading and optimization project of compiled assets, should get smoother from here.

April 5th, 2016

[Global/JS Errors] We’re still shuffling around and optimizing our javascript bundle to get the best page performance possible. I am seeing sporatic errors here and there, and it’s tough because sometimes client-side code gets cached and I have to just wait it out and see if it improves. I am on the case though. If you find something not working right, try the reload button in your browser. If that doesn’t work, don’t be afraid to email us at team@milestepper.com and ask! Sometimes it helps us find problems we weren’t aware of

[Adventures/Map] Greatly improved performance of serving up map images, they used to lag behind the page load

April 3rd, 2016

Had a good weekend backpacking!

[Signup] The signup buttons on the front page were broken after a code re-org

[Adventures/Gear Lists] The behavior to create a gear list is a little more fluid and less awkward than before, takes you right into the list

[Global] Fighting some versioning issues where sometimes people get old pages/scripts which don’t work well with other newer parts of the site. Working on a script distribution system on Amazon that solves this a bit better than we have in the past. Hopefully everything will go smooth and I’ll be able to do hot patches faster when we find issues

April 1st, 2016

[Adventures/Weather] No April Fools here, I fixed the semi-broken metric support for weather again

[Adventures/Exports] Fixed a problem cloudfront was causing that would make exports unstyled

[Explore] Works on mobile but we’re still working on the issue where it auto-closes popups every time you move the map

[Gear Closet] Changed the main menu icon to a knife because the list isn’t very adventurous (or descriptive)

[Adventures] Fixed error when renaming an adventure, it would error out

March 31st, 2016

[Speed up] Moved some of our heavier assets to Amazon Cloudfront which should help load time for those of you that are not close to Atlanta. MileStepper uses a pretty hefty javascript/css bundle that should load only once, but requires refreshes as we make updates to the site. Hopefully this should work better for everyone!

[Gear / Exports] Gear export was missing from menu

March 30th, 2016

[Gear] Fixed a bug where uploads were not working correctly in the gear closet, uploader would popup and then be unresponsive.

[Adventures] You can now comment on cards individually! The comments enter the main discussion stream as well

March 29th, 2016

[Adventures/Export] PDF export is back online, rewritten in React so we can easily reuse the new components we’re making.

[Adventures/Cards] Working on a limited release of allowing comments on cards. These comments show up on the card, and also in the main discussion stream. This way you can comment on specific items, but still not have things all scattered. This is a limited rollout, you’ll see little quote bubbles on your card when it hits your account.

March 27th, 2016

Happy Easter!

[Adventures/Name] Updated adventure name setting to be a popup modal rather than edit in place, less confusing, more consistent.

[Adventures/Export] Started tearing down & rebuilding Adventure PDF Export, will copy most of this code to the pantry and fill export out there once its done, almost identical

March 25th, 2016

[Adventures/Cards] Fixed pasting image data directly into a card, it was silently erroring out

[Adventures/Cards] Fixed z-index issue on moving cards if a URL preview is present

[Adventures/Cards] Added indicator that paste-upload is happening “Upload in progress.”

[Adventures/Cards] Fixed some issues with moving cards around

[Adventures/Cards] Fixed grid-mode URLs to look better

[Adventures/Cards] Made the “add a new card group” behavior a little better, it now adds directly below where you currently are, rather than at the bottom

March 24th, 2016

[Adventures/RSVP] Fixed a problem where the reason for attending/not attending in the RSVP dialog was missing

[Gear/Exports] Fixed exports to now store on Amazon S3

March 23rd, 2016

[Adventures/Cards/Spreadsheets] Fixed a bug where overzealous data reloading after change caused cards to lose editing state

[Adventures/Discussion] Fixed some display bugs with the attach buttons moving around more than we’d like based on what content is there

[Adventures/Discussion] Fixed issue with Chrome ctrl-v image pasting not working (yes, you can paste attachments into a comment!)

March 22nd, 2016

[Gear] Fixed issue with gear imports due to the S3 conversion

[Adventures] Fixed issue with rendering GPX files, ditto

[E-mail] Switched to the Juice library for inlining CSS styles. Previously we were using the MailChimp API and we’re trying to get off of their services due to the Mandrill bait and switch they pulled

March 21th, 2016

[Server] We are trying out running our hosting on DigitalOcean. Things may be a little spotty as we tune it up. If you notice any persistent errors (more than 5 minutes) please let us know team@milestepper.com.

This includes maybe slowish pages – we’re experimenting with how low on resources we can run MileStepper, it’s an exercise in efficiency because we believe that efficient code is more important than blasting hardware and money at a problem. Once we get everything running nicely on the slightly restricted environment, we bump it back up.

[Image Server] We had to dump the image cache in the move, so the first load (ever) of each image will be slow as it pulls from Amazon into our image server. After that, they’re instant forever (or until we move again).

[Adventures/Invitations] Fixed stray half-typed email that worked its way into invitations when using autocomplete (uncleared buffer)

March 20th, 2016

[Global] Switched to a wildcard SSL certificate for *.milestepper.com in preparation for groupname.milestepper.com, upcoming groups feature

[Pantry] Fixed editing the name/other properties of a meal plan, dialog was broken

[Pantry] Fixed editing pantry group names

[Pantry] Fixed bug where saving an item would reload with wrong sorting preferences

[Profile Photos] Fixed an issue where new photos weren’t being saved after cropping (problem with our S3 conversion)

March 18th, 2016

DATABASE ISSUE – While working on an upcoming database migration, there was some InnoDB corruption which caused us to have to roll back about 2 hours between 10pm and midnight. We do take hourly backups and keep them for a month off-site, so your data is safe. Sorry about that, we take that pretty seriously and will take immediate backups before restarting the DB in the future.

[Global] Well that didn’t take long, we’re now using Amazon S3 for storage of user uploads. It gives us better flexibility with hosting in the future. We still run local SSD cache for processed images, so not much should change unless I screwed the pooch on the backend (expect this).

March 17th, 2016

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

[Adventures] Fixed a bug that several people wrote in about, causing times to be incorrect in timezones that are not EST5EDT. A proper offset is applied now, as long as your computer is correct, it will store correct now.

[Uploads] Fixed a bug where whitespace was showing below the save button for the file uploader

Other notes: We’re still working on adventure payments in the background, anything with money is just time consuming interface and testing wise. We’re also investigating the feasibility of moving some components to cloud providers for better long term growth. We may shift some of our Docker containers over to Digital Ocean for testing, and Amazon S3 for uploaded file storage.

March 16th, 2016

[Gear] Fixed an issue in the gear closet where “is consumable” and “is shareable” were not showing up in the gear editor. Thanks /u/uncasius!

March 13th, 2016

[Explore] Added some more filters & search to Explore.

[Explore] Improved the preview of a trip when you click on it. Annoying bug that they disappear when you move the map due to a layer redraw issue. Aware of it and will be working on it.

[Adventures] Removed 2000 old lines of CSS, and 2 old javascript files. These should be dead weight but is always possible I missed porting a function over. Always do! I’ll be watching the error log.

[Adventures] Started rewriting PDF export, it is down for a few

March 12th, 2016

[Preferences] Added ability to list your vehicle for carpool info

[Preferences] Added a floating Save button to easier save prefs, don’t have to scroll to the bottom anymore

[Global] Added easier link to view your public profile, (dropdown list when you click your icon on the top right)

[Explore] Initial, very basic, explore map is released. It’s already better than the old “Everyone” option though. I have a lot more filters & sort options to add, feel free to write in if you have any ideas.

March 11th, 2016

[Adventures/Cards] Fixed bug where “Move Card to Another Group” functionality was missing in adventure cards. Thanks Kelly for reporting this.

[Profile] Added ability to set your own personal cover photo in preferences. Photo shows on dashboard and your profile page

[Profile] Added indicator if you’re a MileStepper supporter

[Profile] Added ability for us to easily set custom titles on users

[Explore] (Still unreleased) Paired down dataset to not show adventures that are on top of your home location (i.e. location never set), or adventures missing cover photos. These are lower quality.

[User Profiles] Added an indicator to your user profile if you donated

[Preferences] Made it a little easier to see what your home location is set to, and easier to set it

[Explore] This is a new page that will show all public MileStepper trips on a map, got some good development going on here but nothing to show yet.

March 5th, 2016

[Gear] Fixed a bug introduced in the Gear Editor last night that prevented it from working

[MileStepper] Added a donation page per user’s request to help support us (thanks for asking!)

[Gear] Fixed a bug introduced today causing the gear pack summary to not show up. There may be some more of these creeping in the corners, they’re the result of a module cleanup and some older modules need to be retrofitted

[Gear] Added the ability to add multiple closets. This used to exist but was down for reconstruction.

[Gear] Fixed issue with adding gear to add-on closet

March 4th, 2016

[Payments] Finished most of the first revision of the adventure payments system. Since this is money and it is very beta, we won’t be releasing it until we do extensive testing and improvements on it. Still, we’re a long way from where we started.

[Profile] Moved the Preferences slideout to a dedicated page where we can add more options

[Admin] Cleaned up some backend tools resulting in a decent code reduction

March 3rd, 2016

Work continues in the background on our payments system, it’s proving to be harder than expected but it is coming along.

[Gear] Updated the “import gear” dialog and brought it up to our current standards

February 29th, 2016

Happy Leap Day!

[Adventures] Updated “new discussion” emails to be cleaner and easier to see the info you’re looking for

[Landing] Fixed some mobile issues on the landing (not-logged-in) page

[Adventures] Fixed issue with GPX file previews not working in comments

[Adventures] Rewrote RSVP dialog

[Adventures] New invitation emails, much cleaner, less cruft!

February 27th, 2016

[Dashboard] Completely rewritten in React.js, this is the last component except for admin tools scheduled for rewrite. It’s disappointing how underwhelming the UI change is because this is such a large internal improvement. If only you could see what I see!

[Global] Removed LARGE SWATHS of code. A whole lot of it. Like tons.

Known issues

PDF exports are going to have issues for a couple days as we come up with a better global system for them. This is also why pantry PDF exports aren’t there yet

February 26th, 2016

[E-mail] Implemented SendGrid as our new notification email provider after MailChimp/Mandrill made some policy changes. Doing what we can to keep MileStepper free for everyone.

[Page speed] Deleted a major amount of old html templates that were being sent to the browser with every request

February 25th, 2016

Phew! Finally finished up the rewrite of the plan board / cards, and that completes the fixed up Adventure page, now written entirely in React.js. Took longer than I wanted but it’s worth it.

I’m sure there will be issues. I’m going to move on to some other less disruptive things and spend some time deleting piles of old code.

The new cards set removes thousands and thousands of lines of old javascript, hundreds of files, and removes the scribe editor that we had so many problems with.

Some updates after general housekeeping is updated. If you have any problems on your adventure pages, just let us know!

February 20th, 2016

Back from Utah and trying to bust out the huge time-suck that is the adventure cards rewrite. They’re looking great so far. Hopefully some more visible changes once all this internal cleanup is done

February 16th, 2016

Fixed “below freezing” showing up when it is not going to be below freezing

February 15th, 2016

Fixed a bug with end trip dates not setting correctly

February 10th, 2016

Fixed various errors on the new adventure page, some missing functions

Re-implemented the cancelation, date reset, trip completion dialogs

Fixed some bugs introduced in new discussion, view old comments

Started on cards rewrite but only appearing on dev server

February 6th, 2016

Team meeting today and ready to start on some new stuff.

Pardon our mess while we update the Adventure page. Fixed a lot of bugs with metric support. Created components that will help us hammer these things out a bit better.

Fixed some bad cache expiration bugs. If you changed your weight preference, some things would not update.

February 4th, 2016

New discussion system released! Hurrah. Redone in React, hope it doesn’t suck. Should look about the exact same to you, but it’s less buggy and now we can add discussion to all kinds of things. This gets us one step closer to ditching something that is emailing me a lot of javascript errors lately (The Guardian’s Scribe). We’re switching all the text editors to QuillJS, and this is a big part of it. Hit me up if you have any problems with comments/attachments.

February 2nd, 2016

[Login] Fixed a problem with password reset not working. Thanks for the bug report!

[Preferences] Fixed an issue where the home location would not set.

[Preferences] Fixed password change inputs not showing

February 1st, 2016

[Global] Fixed lack of compression on script/style files and also hope to have solved some caching problems. A lot of errors people run into are because we update so frequently, so caching is usually a killer.

[Signin] Fixed a pretty bad bug introduced yesterday preventing sign-ins. Switched to a new dedicated sign-in page that should also behave a little better.

January 30th, 2016

[Global] Finally tracked down annoying img_loader js error cropping up on some pages

January 29th, 2016

Back from Denver with all my programming parts intact. Back to work!

[Global] Fixed an iOS/Safari bug with the slideout menus misbehaving. This also affected the left hand menu which was flickery.

[Global] Working on a more efficient way to load javascript using browserify. Hopefully will be transparent to users with slightly faster load times

[Adventures] Re-wrote Adventure Settings dialog in React.js which will help us a bit in the future

[Adventures/Payments] Got the Payments beta running. If you’re interested in beta testing and trying to accept payments on your trips, let us know and we can enable it on your account. Even though this is a beta feature, we’re very careful about money, and no money will be lost guaranteed. Some things will just need manual intervention at works, i.e. to protect a bug from draining our accounts.

[Adventures] Re-wrote several sections in React. Gradually removing old jquery style templates which will take some time and cause some errors. Improved error logging so I’ll be more aware of what is happening.

January 17th, 2016

[Adventures] Fixed a pretty bad bug introduced on the 15th that would prevent some adventures from loading if they contained certain features. This also regresses a fix about character encoding until I can get some things rewritten or issues worked on. Workin on it!

[Global] Fixed the (?) tooltips that were not working on sidebars. Should show a little help when you hover now

[Global] Replaced the upload photo dialog with a new React component that should be less buggy. Progress bar returns finally. Should help a lot with the future

[Pantry] Added ability to tag items

January 15th, 2016

Starting to use the pantry and find the good bugs. Got a long way to go still.

[Pantry] Fixed bug where your list would get nuked if you edited an item while creating a meal plan

[Pantry] Fixed various recalculate bugs and simplified code

[Pantry] Moved Cookbook categories to the top bar, made room for tags

[Gear] Packs are now public default unless otherwise tagged. It helps us out in search engines and we really need people to find out about the site.

[Pantry] Fixed some caching bugs where things would not reload after adding items in certain ways

[Gear] Fixed bug where some settings were not being saved correctly (i.e. is_worn and the item price)

[Global] Fixed some javascript caching issues, incorrect etag was being supplied, causing some users to keep running old code after we update

December 25th-27th, 2015

Merry Christmas! Dropping some big changes. As always, we need depend on the public for testing. The React frontend rewrites are going amazing and things are really feeling good.

Not everything is 100% done yet but we’re going to start rolling out the new features so we can tackle the bugs as users start to find the ones we haven’t.

[Gear Closet] Completely rewritten frontend, all new bugs! Some minor features may be missing for a few days. If we miss something, please feel free to let us know and we’ll put priority on it.

[Pantry] Initial Public Release to all users. We’re not annoucning publicly until we get some data built up, but all users now have access to the pantry.

[Landing] You now get to the main landing page by going to /, and /dashboard is the dashboard page.

[Map] Fixed bug with map sizing bugs in firefox

[Global] Some basic flexbox layouts have been done and should be seamless

[Menu] The left hand menu being context-y ended up being very confusing, so we’ve reverted it to a global menu that does not change. We’ll work in the context items elsewhere.

December 20th, 2015

Starting background work on rewriting the gear closet in React. Wish me luck! Hopefully this will go well and be much more reliable and less buggy.

December 18th, 2015

Back from Denver! Finally. Got a lot of maintenance done on the flights and various blockages on the way home. I’m continuing to re-write as much frontend code in React.js as possible. This puts a little hamper on short-term progress but gives us a better long-term future. More importantly, the React.js code is way, way, way less buggy than my older code.

I’m looking at redoing the gear closet in React.js soon as well. Hopefully that project will only take a week once I get started. The gear closet and trip cards are currently the buggiest parts of MileStepper and we’re aware of that.

[Global] Re-wrote modal (popups) code in React.js, much smoother pleasing animations and 1/3rd the original size

[Shop] Fixed broken links to shop items on the dashboard that appeared after moving the blog to php7

[Global] Added some transitions to dropdown menus

[Map] Modded search box to be a little more apparent

[Map] Fixed some layout bugs and hopefully made it more resilient

[Pantry] Added ability to pack by serving, or by package. For example, 1 package of hot dogs, or 3 hot dogs.

[Pantry] Fixed broken “save” dialog

December 9th, 2015

Added some major Pantry features and a couple bugs I was made aware of elsewhere. We’ll start doing public beta soon by enabling the pantry on accounts starting with the oldest, until it is enabled site-wide.

[Pantry] Added more nutrition information such as fat/protein/etc

[Pantry] Fixed character encoding issues with utf8/extended characters showing up as gibberish

[Adventures] Bugfix on requested invitations where the requestee was not showing up on trips, and an invitation wouldn’t fix their RSVP to show

[Adventures] Bugfix on emails, the date was not showing up for the trip

[Mobile] Aware of several issues on the site looking bad on small mobile devices. Started adding media queries to help out a bit. Some of this may be tricky.

[Safari] Fixed a pretty major bug where sidebars would not go away when a ‘tap-out’ was performed. Some weird thing with Safari disabling event triggers in certain odd conditions

December 4th, 2015

Still hard at work and the backend work is complete, ready to move foward on site dev

[Server] Docker conversion is complete. I didn’t really think we’d go full docker, but as I used it more and more, it just seemed like the next logical step. The new setup is absolutely badass. I have an entire copy of MileStepper on my laptop, so I can develop even offline. This is a big deal because MileStepper is a collection of dozens of services and it was becoming harder and harder to keep track of.

[Login dialog] Completely rewritten login dialog to practice writing React.js before redoing major components (the gear closet, lookin’ at you). I want to be good at React before stepping into major parts of the site.

[Pantry] Added View Item dialog to show ingredients and prep instructions when viewing a meal plan

November 28th, 2015

[Server] Experimenting with Docker and creating containers for the various components of MileStepper. In addition to greater scaling, this will also give us better portability (and make my life easier programming in the woods)

November 27th, 2015

Back from Thanksgiving Bikepacking, ready to do some lines

Pantry is currently alpha/beta/fubar. If you’d like to have early access, send an email to team@milestepper.com. We’re putting a lot of work into building it out. Hopefully it’ll be a future model for gear closet renovations.

Going to try some new tags.

[Pantry] Added “view mode” for when showing your meal plan to others

[Pantry] Accidentally broke “save” buttons, fixed

[Pantry] Switched render layout to no longer use metafizzy’s isotope, which is a disaster. Enhances server-side pre-rendering

[Adventures] Trimmed down some of the old date formatting to lighten the json/data load

[All] Trimmed down the data presented by the files api to lighten the json/data load all around

November 23rd, 2015

Lots of work on the currently-in-beta Pantry/Menu Planner module. Users are being let in on request now (team@milestepper.com to req), although there’s a lot left to be done. Maybe alpha is a better word. Or unfinished.

Some internal speedups avoiding joins in sql queries very boring

Updates to the main landing page. New accounts no longer force creation of a first trip, some people found this confusing. It’s now a lot clearer to get started.

November 20th, 2015

Implemented new mapbox dialog, should be a bit better

Fixed bug with GPX viewing in new mapbox dialog

Finally tracked down bug where “Anonymous” has requested an invitation to a trip. It was happening when someone requested an invitation, and was already on the trip. They now get a quick-login link instead of a silent error.

Shifted some backend around to prepare for more growth. Adding a dedicated ssd mariadb vm with 8 gigs of ram, and a router vm

Preliminary work on accepting payments. Stripe and Paypal integrations are complete, Paypal payouts, working on a trip cost sharing ledger before they are useful. These will likely be pro features.

November 18th, 2015

Playing catchup a bit while we retool with React.js. Things are looking really good, and we’re ready to develop even more rapid than before.

Changed “home” map icon to just a star, based on user feedback. We’ll let you choose your own icons soon.

Completed Stripe and Paypal integrations which will make their way into the public site soon enough. These took 3 days, which is a lot of dev time, but will allow us to eventually process cards and group dues on your behalf.

More beta pantry work which can’t be shown yet. If you’re reading this, email team@milestepper.com and we’ll give you early access.

November 13th, 2015

Working on two top secret projects for the site (2 new sections), so there may not be much visible change for the next few days. Got some good things coming!

New icons for “Add card” and “Add card group” on adventures. Also the group icon is now visible and easier to get to.

Working on switching to geojson internally instead of gpx for better kml/google earth support

Changed image server to using redis cache instead of memcached. Welcome to 2015

Fixed more issues with KML files. Switched our geo storage format to geojson, so you can now plan your routes with Google Earth.

November 12th, 2015

Fixed a bug preventing you from changing your email settings if a trip was full

Cleaned up databases to make things a little faster, improved backups

CSS cleanups on adventure cards

November 10th, 2015

Fixed bug with mapping KML files. We have temporarily broken distance/speed stats on these files, but the imaging is more important. Stats will be back when we write a geoJSON stats processor (unless you have one?)

Removed “enter to save” in the gear closet because it was causing some unpredictable issues.

Fixed formatting bug with editing comments

Added direct links to “new discussion” emails that take you directly to the comment. Or near it.

November 9th, 2015

Fixed a bug where GPX files were not being read correctly if they did not have waypoints (thanks Sandman)

Fixed a nasty create-pack bug if a trip already had packs on it from other users

November 6th, 2015

Style updates to gear closet weight table, more to come on this soon

Caching improvements to trip pages, should load a little faster

Beta integration with Google My Maps

Improved geojson support with trip cards

Uploaded GPX/KML files will now show up on the main map thumbnail

All uploaded GPX/KML files will now combine on the Adventure Map

November 5th, 2015

Fixed some mapping errors with points of interest showing up

Fixed a problem where sometimes notification emails go out un-rendered

Style updates to trip discussion, although this entire section will be replaced eventually.

November 3rd, 2015

Had a few days with not much to post. We’ve been working on hardware upgrades in prep for scaling up.

Fixed another nasty iOS bug preventing focusing on input boxes (thanks to hammer.js, we have now removed it)

October 28th, 2015

Bug fixed with adventure card re-ordering, if you tried to edit afterwards it would get cancelled.

Backend work today. We’re preparing for more users & expansion by splitting off components that we designed to expand horizontally. The image server and user file server are the first one to head off onto their own vm instances. We’re going to test for a few days to make sure these run ok before moving on to bigger things.

October 27th, 2015

Trying out React JS to hopefully speed up developement of the site and reduce rendering bugs/UI inconsistencies. I’ll be practicing a bit on our admin panel for a few days.

October 26th, 2015

Fixed and re-enabled elevation graphs for GPX/KML/KMZ uploads

Doing some database optimization to make things faster

Fixed annoying behavior on menu buttons where re-clicking causes the menu to not go away

Fixed problem with invalid forecast shown if a trip was moved after it ended.

Changed “Include in pack?” to “Worn?” in gear editor. In practice there was very little reason to ever log an items weight but not have it included in your pack. It was confusing to users, and we needed the UI realestate. We rolled all “Include in pack? = no” into “Worn? = yes” so there should be no difference in calculations. Hopefully. This may result in some issues as it is a fairly major change, but it will be better for everyone going forward.

October 17th, 2015

Added feature: GPX explorer. If you upload a GPX (GPS data) file to one of your cards, you can now click on it to view in an interactive map. Before we only supported static map rendering. More to come. Screenshot

Fixed cache expiration when moving gear from one group to another. Thanks for the bug report!

October 16th, 2015

Fixed a bug moving gear between groups, caching issue.

Added CSV import detection for lighterpack.com exports

Added photos to gear export

Fixed bug with gear weight toggle not showing up when not signed in

Fixed bug when setting adventure dates, the end date would get clobbered when edited.

Fixed various bugs with uploading images that contained query strings such as ? and &. Improved detection of broken images.

Found a solution for improved GPX track stats, working on implementation

We were made aware of some iOS9 input bugs that we’re working on. We upgraded the software on our text editor and have removed an old iOS mod we had in, this should correct it.

Fixed Safari Mobile bugs with viewport sizing not playing right. Disabled some pretty things until Apple sorts their stuff out.

Fixed bugs in the new manual invitation links which caused a new user to have not a great experience

10x speedup in adding invitations to trips

10x speedup to rsvp replies

October 9th, 2016

Greatly improved Adventure Export to PDF so you can view your trip plans on the go. More work needed on this, but it’s usable now

October 6th, 2016

Re-introduced ability to duplicate trips, integrated a much better duplication system so that we can keep up with it as we add features. Thanks for the feedback!

October 5th, 2016

Back from Maine but only for a few days.

Fixed big bug with metric/imperial conversion on miles/kilometers. Again. If your trip has the wrong distance listed, I’m very sorry but just reset it.

Fixed some reported UI layout bugs

September 28th, 2016

Fixed a few bugs in the gear closet with printed rounded weights and a bug introduced to the gear search system

September 26th, 2016

Marathon work afternoon!

Updated trip card maps to now be provided by mapbox

New invitation system laid down

Now allowing generic invitation links to be sent

September 25th 2015

Marathon work night!

Added ability to draw on maps

Adventure menu now highlights as you scroll

Cosmetic tweaks to global left menu

Added Google Maps link to dialog box in interactive maps

Improved zooming behavior on a map items when you click to view a specific item

Changed color of currently editing card

September 23rd 2015

Been under the weather lately, on the mend now so continuing with development.

Moving away from Google Maps since Leaflet and Mapbox will suit our needs better. Began integration Mapbox into MileStepper

Multi-location support in the works with interactive maps

All things that have a now location will all appear on your interactive adventure map

September 18th 2015 (major release)

Adventure page major style overhaul

Adventure page info organization, going more for Who What When Where Why

Unified input box in adventure card editor, lets you type in locations or paste web URLs all into the same box. Much simpler.

Removed “Activity” from adventure page to reduce confusion

Removed “Difficulty” from adventure page, it was not all that useful

Improved URL previews

Fixed several errors in gear pack calculations and toggle states

Fixed a bug in uploading profile photos

September 15th 2015

CSS style improvements to adventure cards

Improved consistency of left menu icons

Bugfixes in the mobile menu (preferences didn’t work)

September 14th 2015

Back from the woods! Some performance tweaks

Added address detection to card map markers. Set a location on your adventure card, and an address will show now.

Fixed an error which cut our cache speed in half

Increased cache expiration time 24x to expose more cache bugs and increase performance

Improved prefetch table joins for faster loading of gear

September 10th 2015

Removed css3 columns from adventure cards (grid mode) because it is too buggy in Chrome. Hopefully some day we can revisit this. Looked into other options, but none are very good. We stick with a hard grid w/ gaps for now.

Fixed bugs in the gear closet with export rounding

Fixed render bugs in the gear closet when a logged-out user is viewing packs

Fixed several bugs loading info from a URL such as amazon in the gear closet editor

Fixed several bugs in the adventure card editor in the new spreadsheets

Consolidated adventure card features under one sub-menu (the big * button instead of 10 individual buttons)

Added H2 to editors to allow for large/bold text in editors

Tuned up location previews on cards

Added an Adventure Map that shows all points of interest for your adventure on a single map. We’ll be doing more work on this and integrating it better soon

September 7th 2015

Unified mobile menu and regular site main menu

September 4th, 2015

Major left menu changes, trying to segment the site a bit without being confusing.

Removed image-preview loading sequence from adventure cards because it is problematic on re-render (edit/save). It will be hacky to make that work, not worth it.

Switched adventure cards in grid-mode to a more ‘pinterest’y layout. The cards compress better but css3 columns are definitely a little buggy.

Started to sneak in very basic, and very buggy table (spreadsheet) support for adventure cards

Added a sample public adventure to the “create” dialog. Trying to show that it doesn’t expose personal info about people.

September 2nd, 2015

Modified it so travelers list is hidden unless an adventure is joinable. Example: your adventure is publicly visible but still invitation only. People can’t see the attendees names and faces unless you set it to “Anyone can join”

September 1st, 2015

Added Daily Gear Deals page

Optimized Redis cache routines for being able to expire cache for only specific users instead of flushing the entire system. This may be problematic if I did it badly, symptoms being pages that do not reflect changes after they are made.

August 31st, 2015

Removed errant alert dialog

Fixed a bug in amazon sku detection

Fixed a bug with invalid encoding on cache causing trips to disappear

Fixed some errors in sun & moon time data

Started integrating trip payments system

August 30th, 2015

Re-added auto scroll for adventure cards, but only on new cards/groups

Fixed bug with some people getting the welcome email under the wrong circumstances

August 27th, 2015

Checklist support added to adventure cards. We supported markdown checklists before, but they never worked very well. These should be much better.

Fixed a bug with adventure cards disappearing or failing to add/edit due to internal data corruption after editing a group name

Cleaned up url preview flow on adventure cards

Added pinterest share button to trips

Removed auto-scroll on adventure card editing because it doesn’t work quite right and is more annoying than helpful

Modified adventure card save button to be more consistent with the rest of the site

Cleaned up url display on adventure cards

Fixed bug in adventure date setting dialog, it was troublesome when a date was already set

Added “load info from URL” functionality to gear closet. Paste a URL and we’ll fetch the photo and item brand/name if it is a retailer we partner with

August 26th, 2015

Fixed bug(s) with comment system and unwanted refreshes (caused jerky behavior when posting)

Fixed bug with pinning a comment to an adventure card, although it still needs work

August 24th, 2015

Fixed z-index issue on mobile for gear page (or introduced a new one)

Added MountainGear.com to our gear database

Added Patagonia.com to our gear database

August 23rd, 2015

Added preliminary support for “worn” gear while packing

Added affiliates footer to beg for money

Fixed some minor javascript errors under certain conditions

Removed unused javascript libraries (jquery-ui, gtfo)

August 21st, 2015

Simplified adventure date/time selection dialog

Fixed card re-ordering placeholder size when in grid mode

Adjusted adventure card editor to better match card display style

Fixed bug with cards push reloading after editing. Push reloads are only supposed to happen when another user is editing the same page you are on (i.e. like Google docs)

Added “is consumable?” flag to gear editor

Added “is shareable?” flag to gear editor

Added preliminary consumable/durable/shareable bits to pack calc

August 20th, 2015

Fixed character encoding issues on gear list exports

Fixed exports not paying attention to user gear preferences

Fixed issue on gear exports with weights not showing up for entire list exports

August 19th, 2015

Updated internal character encoding to fix some international characters that were being turned to ? when stored

Fixed bug in “Save as a new pack” that would overwrite the current gear pack

Fixed some CSS alignment issues

Moved to Google WebFonts loader for fonts

August 15th, 2015

Added optional titles to adventure cards

Modified adventure summary and commenting system to use new scribe html based editor instead of the old textile formatting language

Replaced upload dialog to handle multi-file uploads, more simple album support in the future